LinusKS
05-05-2006, 02:26 PM
Last weekend English Harbour was caught cheating in its Video Poker game. This is their initial response:
[ QUOTE ]
Thank you for taking the time to review and play our games. We take your comments seriously and as such have spent time reviewing our Video Poker game play and also await some feedback on an independent review from a 3rd party.
We have concluded our review of the game play and randomness for all Video Poker games. Although the doubling component of Video Poker is theoretically deterministic, it's common knowledge that there are varying chances for winning and losing when picking a card out of four, to play against the card that is dealt face up.
Randomness:
It's important that the frequency distribution of the cards in an adequate sample set are evenly distributed for each position in the doubling game. We have found, taking several sample sets over different and varying lengths of time, that they yield in our opinion, a non biased distribution of the cards.
Game Play:
In theory, the number of Wins versus the number of losses and (excluding ties) will converge to 50% over a sample set that is large enough. Should small sample sets be used to measure this metric, then results will vary as seems to be the case tracing through this thread.
We trust, that we have responded adequately and any doubt in peoples' mind are put to rest.
English Harbour Management
[/ QUOTE ]
Michael Shackleton - also known as "The Wizard of Odds," is a consultant for Odds On, and certifies the fairness of their games.
He found that, "When I received the logs and analyzed them I was able to confirm that the double-up on video poker did indeed pay out less than it should have between April 13 and May 2."
His analysis showed that the payout dropped from 50.08% on Apr. 12th, to 33.33% on Apr. 14th, where it stayed until May 1st, when it jumped to 45.91%. (The cheating was reported on Apr. 29th.)
Odds On issued a new response today.
[ QUOTE ]
The issue was caused by a bug in the software staging release on the later part of the day April 13 and went unnoticed. On May 2 we had a maintenance release that during the course of our investigation seemed to have corrected the problem.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm no kind of software expert, but their explanation seems odd to me.
I know that when I have problems with software, it usually just causes the program to crash. That their bug caused a dramatic increase in the house advantage (from 0% to 33%) in one specific game (one favored by what casinos refer to as "bonus abusers") seems strange, especially since it didn't affect anything else at English Harbour.
Is the English Harbour/ Odds On explanation believable?
[ QUOTE ]
Thank you for taking the time to review and play our games. We take your comments seriously and as such have spent time reviewing our Video Poker game play and also await some feedback on an independent review from a 3rd party.
We have concluded our review of the game play and randomness for all Video Poker games. Although the doubling component of Video Poker is theoretically deterministic, it's common knowledge that there are varying chances for winning and losing when picking a card out of four, to play against the card that is dealt face up.
Randomness:
It's important that the frequency distribution of the cards in an adequate sample set are evenly distributed for each position in the doubling game. We have found, taking several sample sets over different and varying lengths of time, that they yield in our opinion, a non biased distribution of the cards.
Game Play:
In theory, the number of Wins versus the number of losses and (excluding ties) will converge to 50% over a sample set that is large enough. Should small sample sets be used to measure this metric, then results will vary as seems to be the case tracing through this thread.
We trust, that we have responded adequately and any doubt in peoples' mind are put to rest.
English Harbour Management
[/ QUOTE ]
Michael Shackleton - also known as "The Wizard of Odds," is a consultant for Odds On, and certifies the fairness of their games.
He found that, "When I received the logs and analyzed them I was able to confirm that the double-up on video poker did indeed pay out less than it should have between April 13 and May 2."
His analysis showed that the payout dropped from 50.08% on Apr. 12th, to 33.33% on Apr. 14th, where it stayed until May 1st, when it jumped to 45.91%. (The cheating was reported on Apr. 29th.)
Odds On issued a new response today.
[ QUOTE ]
The issue was caused by a bug in the software staging release on the later part of the day April 13 and went unnoticed. On May 2 we had a maintenance release that during the course of our investigation seemed to have corrected the problem.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm no kind of software expert, but their explanation seems odd to me.
I know that when I have problems with software, it usually just causes the program to crash. That their bug caused a dramatic increase in the house advantage (from 0% to 33%) in one specific game (one favored by what casinos refer to as "bonus abusers") seems strange, especially since it didn't affect anything else at English Harbour.
Is the English Harbour/ Odds On explanation believable?